At a North Portland school, a lifelong music lover and students in the BRAVO music program meet and learn in the circle of life

On a busy musical afternoon at Sitton Elementary School in Portland’s St. Johns district earlier this month, a woman arrived at after-school music rehearsals bearing gifts: a cello in a hard case, and a half-size violin.

As it turns out, the cello and violin – as welcome as they were for the BRAVO Youth Orchestras program, in a school where the price of instruments is often beyond the means of the young musicians’ families – were emblematic of a larger gift: a gift of love and legacy; a passing-on, from generation to generation, of joy and encouragement. A going-away gift; a final grace note.

Sara Waddell and BRAVO’s Seth Truby, passing the torch.

The students are part of BRAVO, a program fashioned after
the El Sistema movement that began in 1975 on the outskirts of Caracas,
Venezuela, to bring the love and challenge of music to children in the barrios.
Portland’s program began in 2013, and also concentrates on areas with higher
than average poverty rates.

The woman is Sara Waddell, a 52-year-old mother of two teens
from Beaverton who set aside her own musical studies and teaching career years
ago to raise her sons. “I had sold my wonderful cello with its rich, beautiful
tone from my younger years of trying to learn in college when my kids were very
small and my little family needed the money,” she said. “Then I did without and
believed I had given up learning to play forever.”

The go-between is Joe Cantrell, a veteran photojournalist
and frequent ArtsWatch contributor who has followed BRAVO from close to its
beginning and who almost accidentally became friends with Waddell about a year
and a half ago through the online NextDoor network. Waddell was looking to
borrow an exercise bike to help her recovery from what she thought was a sports
injury. Cantrell had one. “We discovered that her father and I had both been
Brown Water Navy sailors in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War,” he said.
That began a bond of friendship.

A long and unexpected journey led to the January afternoon’s
meeting of the generations at Sitton Elementary, one of BRAVO’s key sites in
its mission to make music a central part of learning and life for lower-income
children. That involves, among other things, supplying instruments for kids to
practice on and play in performance, advancing them from basic learning
instruments to larger and higher-quality ones as their bodies and skills grow. “We
started seven years ago with the poorest school in Portland Public Schools.
Rosa Parks Elementary,” said Seth Truby, BRAVO’s co-founder and executive
director.

A Sitton BRAVO student, taking a violin for a spin around the musical block.

Life happens, and often in unanticipated ways. Waddell had
wanted to learn to play the cello, and wanted to be a teacher. She married, and
had two children, and did become a teacher, but learning the cello got put off.
She worked as a substitute teacher, deciding she needed a flexible schedule to
care for her family. Life was busy. And there was what she calls “a painful
divorce.”

“I decided to try to learn the cello again while my kids
took music lessons of their own so we would all
have to practice,” she recalled. “But I truly didn’t have time to practice as a
single mom, or money for lessons, so I gave it up again and intended to sell it
one day.”

That left teaching: “I love students and teaching with all
my heart. My oldest son was thriving in the wonderful Merlo Station High School
(an alternative high school in Beaverton), so I was at last able to begin my
teaching career, this time in special education instead of English and social
studies 7-12, as I had intended to do when I was just out of college in my 20s.”

In June of 2018 she put out the ad for an exercise bike, and met Cantrell. “I was working on my funding and application to graduate school at Portland State University, certain it was my year and all was about to happen for me with my career.” And that, coincidentally, is when the story took a big left turn.

What she wanted to recover from wasn’t a sport injury. Instead, she learned, she had cancer. “It’s an ‘undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma’ and is as rare as winning millions in the lottery,” Waddell said in an email exchange. “And as rare as it is, it’s even a cancer that tends to strike men in their 70s – certainly not a chubby, but otherwise perfectly healthy 51-year-old woman!”

Except for her young sons, her entire family was on the East
Coast. “I only knew Mr. Cantrell from borrowing his exercise bike,” she said,
“but I knew he is a journalist and asked him to accompany me to my biopsy
followup appointment at OHSU, because they insisted I bring someone along.”
Cantrell, she thought, was “an incredibly kind and gracious human being as well
as someone who could keep it together and take notes during the appointment, in
which I was told I had a 50-50 chance of living five years. But I didn’t know
that at the time. The bravery to call a relative stranger and ask him to come
along and help was providential, and one of the smartest things I’ve ever
done.”

The aftermath of chemo, as Cantrell put it, “went very
badly.” It killed her large intestine. She has an ileostomy, and almost died
from septicemia. “Yet I lived,” Waddell said. “OHSU pulled a rabbit out of a
hat and did what few hospitals in this country could have done, and they saved
my life. … I believe what happened to me when I lived last fall was an act of
God. I’m simply thankful it gave me another year to get ready in my life and
say goodbye to my beautiful boys.”

For Cantrell, what some might have considered a duty became
a kind of gift, perhaps even a blessing. “We’ve been to many appointments
together,” he said. “I’ve seen her in what seems a tractor-beam of love with
kids, reflecting her upmost desire to be able to teach kids with special needs.
I’ve seen her interact with kids. It has always been revelatory for all
involved.”

Waddell’s health continued to deteriorate. “I had multiple
surgeries, drains for abdominal abscesses,” she said. “After almost three
months in the hospital, and then time in rehab to learn how to walk, talk,
swallow, and so on again, I came home in a wheelchair and excellent home health
care from Providence.” Then the cancer metastasized. After a clinic trial
failed to help, she was put on hospice care in November.

“These things happen,” Waddell said simply. “It’s just my
turn. Of course, it’s heartbreaking. My teen boys are 15 and 18, and I’ll never
be able to teach in the classroom, but I’m thankful for so much. Truly! Our
brothers and sisters around the world have cancers, and they are getting bombs
dropped on them as well, or are miles away from the nearest Band-Aid. I live 25
minutes from OHSU. I had Obamacare since I worked as a substitute teacher and
was a single mom.”

BRAVO Lead Teaching Artist Emma Downing at the center of the circle of learning at Sitton Elementary.

And that, finally, brought Waddell to her January afternoon meeting
at Sitton Elementary School with the teachers and students of BRAVO Youth
Orchestras, where a passing-along of much more than musical instruments took
place. “Last week Sara asked if I had any ideas where she might donate her
personal cello and her son’s half-size violin,” Cantrell said on the day of the
meeting. “I suggested Seth’s miraculous kids in North Portland. A few
arrangements, and today I had the privilege of being in the room where Sara got
to interact again with a group of kids. The immediate, positive body-language
response around that talented, bright circle was palpable. And the cello and
violin will lead long, happy, fulfilling lives.”

Ordinarily, when people donate instruments to BRAVO, they drop them at the organization’s offices. This wasn’t an ordinary donation. “When I understood the circumstances I said, ‘How about if we meet at one of our programs?’” Truby said. “Sara was really delighted to see the class.” A fair number of visitors drop in to observe classes, Truby noted, and the students are used to it. “What was different is that Sara was so excited that she joined in the clapping and singing exercises. So it was like extending the circle. It was delightful to see her join the music-making. She was so moved by the experience that she asked to address the students. She gave an impromptu talk. I don’t think she’d planned it. It was very much from the heart.”

Waddell’s donated violin, which is in fine condition, will
go into immediate use. Her cello, Truby said, needs a little minor work,
including some bridge adjustment, but it’s of higher quality than many of the
instruments the students use. “The cello that Sara gave us is a full-sized
cello, and it’s quite a nice one – nicer than your standard student cello,” he
said. “I’m saving it for a serious, advanced high school student.”

That pleases Waddell. “Now that I am dying,” she said, “there’s
just no contest between selling it for perhaps half of what I paid for it or
less and giving it to a student who could learn with a beautiful cello of their
very own. As I do the work of handling my stuff and all the valuables and
clobber we accumulate in our lives, there was no question I would most want
these instruments to go to a program for students eager to learn music. It was
an honor to meet everyone and even just be in a classroom for my last time,
seeing the work of all these unsung heroes of teachers who daily give of
themselves for the best futures for kids. All of it was an overwhelming
blessing for me.

“I don’t have much to give, but I’m giving what I can from
my heart. My work wardrobe went to a women’s homeless shelter, and it similarly
makes me happy to think of these women getting a fresh start and new jobs with
the label-hound finds I have collected from thrift stores all these years.

“I think of people as I get ready to leave this earth. Just
imagine their faces! We are all brothers and sisters, really, and it simply
makes me happy to give all I can to do some good – and pour out all the love in
my heart – as I say goodbye. This is why I wanted to give these instruments to
these students, who are our future, and I wish them the best of all in the best
of possible worlds.”